A: There’s no way to gather data on that so it’s not a thing.
This is the problem with “data driven” decision making in a nutshell. It has annoyed me to no end at every company I’ve worked for.
On the other hand, virtually every study of the Vietnam war said it was a huge mistake and Domino theory was bullshit.
At the end of the day every company wants to make money, or will be bought out by cutthroats who think it's all there is, and this kind of thinking will take hold. Users you can't profit from = leeches.
The equivalent in the online world would be to pay site X to show ad Y at times Q-Z. And then you just trust that they'll do so, like you have to do for print/TV ads, and pay the site. That does happen, and you can find quite a lot of company blog posts out there saying that it works, but it's much more manual so yeah. It isn't the majority.